David Dayen

David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon.com who also writes for The Intercept, The New Republic, and The Fiscal Times. His first book, Chain of Title, about three ordinary Americans who uncover Wall Street's foreclosure fraud, was released by The New Press on May 17, 2016.

AP Images/Charles Dharapak W ho becomes the next Federal Reserve chair matters, not only because of the implications for economic and monetary policy, but because the Fed remains one of the nation’s chief financial regulators. There are dozens of policies, some we don’t even know about, over which the Fed wields critical influence. While the past year has seen a small but important shift toward tighter controls, particularly on the largest Wall Street institutions, all of that could change if President Barack Obama selects another deregulator in the Greenspan tradition. A perfect example of the Fed’s centrality to the financial regulatory space came last week, when a Senate hearing focused on an unseemly practice that the Fed perpetuated and has the power to stop. As reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, large investment banks like Goldman Sachs have purchased warehousing facilities for aluminum and shuffled the product from one facility to another. When a purchaser buys the...

AP Images/Harry Hamburg One of the biggest catastrophes of the 2008 financial crisis came out of the AIG Financial Products division, whose disastrous trades eventually led to a $182 billion bailout of the insurance company. One of the largest financial market blowups since the crisis came from the Chief Investment Office of JPMorgan Chase , where similar trades backfired and cost the company at least $6.2 billion. The common thread? Both of these offices, despite being subsidiaries of American corporations, were based in London, and they enjoyed a degree of autonomy, both from their management teams and from federal regulators, who were unable to recognize the outsized risk until it was too late. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law intended to end the practice of financial industry behemoths shifting away their riskiest practices from U.S. regulators’ prying eyes. But a rule that would subject the $630 trillion global derivatives market to the same regulations, no matter the location...

AP Images/Don Ryan Revelations from Bank of America whistleblowers show widespread and ongoing abuse of homeowners seeking loan modifications to avoid foreclosure. Customer service representatives were told to lie about pending modifications and were given bonuses for pushing homeowners into default. The allegations mirror continued complaints about “dual tracking,” a practice where mortgage servicers pursue foreclosure while deciding whether or not to grant a loan modification. Servicers at the five biggest banks were required to pay $25 billion in fines and agree to dozens of new guidelines to curb these abuses as part of last year’s National Mortgage Settlement. While the banks argue that they have fixed any outstanding problems, a recent report from the settlement’s oversight monitor, Joseph Smith, showed continuing violations in several key areas, though not to the degree that housing advocates claim . This discrepancy between homeowner complaints and bank pleas of innocence can...

AP Images/Dan Hallman “A few years ago I was planning on killing myself in my garage, and now I’m doing the best thing I’ve ever done in my life in that same garage,” says comedian Marc Maron in the premiere episode of Maron . The eponymous new show on IFC is an extension of Maron’s real life, and the wildly successful WTF podcast that resurrected his career. Many of the plots grow out of actual experiences, from tracking down an Internet troll to dating a dominatrix. But the show probably won’t mine what Maron himself would describe as his most painful episode: hosting a liberal political talk radio show. I know this because I met Marc then, in 2006, when he was in that “planning on killing myself” phase. At the time I was performing random acts resembling stand-up comedy at laundromats and sandwich shops throughout the greater Los Angeles area, while also stepping into political writing with a new and exciting invention of the age called a blog. My comedian friends and I had a...

As we trudge through the swamp of disappointment that defines Dodd-Frank implementation, the liberal commentariat has lately seized upon a new meme; Wall Street lobbyists are responsible for gutting Dodd-Frank behind closed doors. Big-pocketed firms deploy phalanxes of clever lawyers and influence peddlers that easily outpace reformers, ensuring that the regulations ultimately written are sufficiently defanged to allow the financial industry to conduct its business with few, if any, restrictions. The lobbyists, and mostly the lobbyists alone, bear responsibility. Witness the most recent rollback of Dodd-Frank, a compromise on derivatives regulations by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The New York Times ’ Ben Protess makes the culprit clear in his Page 1 report : “ Under pressure from Wall Street lobbyists , federal regulators have agreed to soften a rule intended to rein in the banking industry’s domination of a risky market.” (Emphasis mine.) But this gets things...